Perhaps in response to the general feeling that the massive Rauschenberg retrospective presented at the Guggenheim in 1997 would have benefitted from more editing, MoMA’s lead curator, Leah Dickerman, aided by both her curatorial team and by the artist and film-maker Charles Atlas, has been more stringent. This approach is at odds with some aspects of Rauschenberg’s own modus operandi, but for this kind of show – which was hardly going to be wanting for work to include – that was a good thing.

 
The exhibition nevertheless still brings together over 150 of Rauschenberg’s works, and amongst them many of his most iconic statements, organised across eleven galleries. The selection was augmented by an exceedingly well measured sprinkling of pieces by artists with whom Rauschenberg had lived, worked or otherwise collaborated: Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, Susan Weil, Sari Dienes, Marcel Duchamp, Jean Tinguely, Niki de Saint Phalle, Hazel Larsen Archer, John Cage, Billy Klüver, and a wide array of dancers and choreographers (Paul Taylor, Merce Cunningham, Steve Paxton, Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer, etc). Charles Atlas, who was also stage manager for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company for ten years or so, enlisted here as curatorial collaborator, was entrusted with the task of editing and installing the film footage of Rauschenberg’s many performances and dance collaborations.

 
The works themselves are supplemented by some illuminating wall texts: there are main panels for each room plus numerous ‘in focus’ texts accompanying specific works. There’s also an audio guide, the text of which has been made available on the MoMA press website, in which Dickerman offers brief explanations and introduces an impressive series of interviews with figures close to the artist: Christopher Rauschenberg (his son), Susan Weil, Calvin Tomkins, Julie Martin, and David White, for example, and, indeed, with Rauschenberg himself. There are other events and performances on the programme too, footage of which can be viewed on the MoMA website.

 
As in London, MoMA’s exhibition is arranged broadly chronologically, beginning with the work that the artist produced at Black Mountain College in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and stretching to a handful of pieces from the 1990s, plus just one very late inkjet dye transfer work from 2005, before the show ended with a small final room dedicated to the Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange (ROCI), which ran 1984-1990. While inclusive of the broad trajectory of the artist’s more-than-sixty-year career, however, Dickerman and her team have not sought to challenge the prevailing sense that Rauschenberg’s most consequential contributions were made in the 1950s and the first half of the 1960s.

 
This is not to say that other later moments do not carry potency here: Room 8’s sequence of three large-scale works from the Cardboards series (1971-72) together with Glacier (Hoarfrost) (1974) and Sor Aqua (Venetian) (1973) was powerful, and the bent, buckled, and busted Gluts (1986-87), oddly animate ruins salvaged from America’s troubled oil and automobile industry, also look impressive. Nevertheless, the amount of wall space given over to the zipped-together and interchangable Hiccups (1978) seemed to me too generous, and the corporate scale of the later photographic dye transfer and screen-print-on-metal works (only sparingly represented here) reaffirmed the sense that the artist was at his best when his material means were more limited. Contrariwise, for me some of the more puckish small-scale gestures from the 1960s do not stand up to very much scrutiny: apart, perhaps, from Warhol’s note of genuine irreverence I wouldn’t much care whether the Moon Museum got attached to the Apollo 12 spacecraft or not; the telegrammed ‘conceptual portrait’ of Iris Clert (1961) carries none of the risk and reverberation of the earlier Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953, also on show here); and – and this is perhaps a more controversial judgement – for me both of the famous performance-paintings, First Time Painting (1961) and Gold Standard (1964), only go to demonstrate just how much Rauschenberg’s combines gained from having hung around his studio for a while.

 
Especially welcome in New York, as in London, are the complete set of the rarely-seen XXXIV Drawings for Dante’s Inferno (1958-60), very happily accompanied here by print-outs of Michael Sonnabend’s original summaries of Dante’s cantos, with which the drawings were first shown at Leo Castelli Gallery, and which recently turned up in the Castelli archives in Washington D.C., having long been thought lost. Rauschenberg’s drawings were indeed intended as illustrations, and throughout the 1960s were exhibited with written commentaries relating them to Dante’s poetry, to aid viewers’ engagement. Charles Atlas has also done a great job of energizing the experience of video footage that is not always in itself very compelling: his visually and conceptually inventive display of the Nine Evenings: Theatre and Engineering events (1966) has the audience move around the various performers, navigating a series of screens mounted on forest pipes, in a neat and appealing solution. Indeed, sound and dance pervade, nuance and enliven the exhibition compellingly throughout.

 
A big Rauschenberg show offers MoMA a fabulous opportunity to deploy its uniquely rich resources: a supreme collection of American art from the 1950s; large, flexible, and absolutely state-of-the-art exhibition spaces; the capacity to bring on board a whole host of key figures from Rauschenberg’s immediate circle; and archival and research holdings matched by few other modern art institutions (one contender, though, is San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which will be this exhibition’s third and final destination).

 
Two particular aspects of Dickerman’s curation should be singled out for special praise: firstly, the decision to introduce works by other artists, and the manner in which this has been done; and, secondly, the subtlety and precision with which she has enriched our understanding of key artworks by letting certain formal and visual correspondences do their own kind of work (in this sense she is importantly responsive to Rauschenberg’s method). While there are many examples throughout the show – and particularly early on, when you feel Dickerman is most sharply engaged – the full force of the curatorial intelligence was particularly strongly felt in the two rooms that constituted what Peter Schjeldahl has described as the exhibition’s ‘beating heart’: those covering the period from 1954-1960.

 
In Room 3, Red Paintings and Early Combines, the potent pell-mell of Charlene (1954, also in London), was joined by both the airier Rebus (1955) and the joyfully freestanding Minutiae (1954), neither of which was at Tate. Above Minutiae, unobtrusively installed, was a projection of Atlas’s footage of the Cunningham dancers moving around the combine, in a performance also called Minutiae. These major statements were accompanied by a rich and garrulous Red Painting, and by Bed (1955), Short Circuit (1955), and both Factum I and Factum II (both 1957).
More than this, though, Dickerman was able to exploit the museum’s extraordinary holdings to make interventions of great visual and conceptual precision: the hanging of Jasper Johns’ Target with Four Faces (1955) next to Short Circuit, for example, was not only a visual coup, but also served to subtly dramatize the theme of intimate collaboration: the face that Johns cast to make his work was that of Rachel Rosenthal, a close friend of Rauschenberg and Johns, and Short Circuit itself once contained a miniature Johns Flag – when it was stolen it was replaced by the current Sturtevant replica – and a small work by Susan Weil. Likewise, across the room and to the left of Rebus are three drawings by Cy Twombly from 1954, very similar to that found on the surface of Rebus itself. With Bed in the same room, the romantic entanglements of Rauschenberg, Twombly and Johns are hinted at too, perhaps, but this dimension of Rauschenberg’s life is consistently downplayed throughout the presentation, in keeping with all three artists’ own comportments but rather problematic given the wealth of recent scholarship on the topic. (The only explicit mention of Rauschenberg’s homosexuality is found in the audio guide commentary on the museum’s own majestic Canyon [1959].)

 
Other noteworthy interventions arrive in the first two rooms, where, for example, Rauschenberg’s early photographic experiments at Black Mountain College are accompanied by works by his teacher, Hazel Larsen Archer, as well as by Cy Twombly and Aaron Siskind; and Automobile Tire Print is joined in Room 2 (another high point) by Sari Dienes’s impressive pavement rubbing, SoHo Sidewalk (c.1953-55), which was a revelation to me but had been introduced to New York audiences by a major Drawing Center presentation of Dienes’ work in 2014. Rauschenberg’s mature forays into performance in the early 1960s are displayed together with works by Johns, Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely, and Marcel Duchamp; and the room of silkscreens – as if having nine of the best of them together wasn’t enough – also featured Andy Warhol’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Rauschenberg Family) from 1962, on loan from Washington. These kinds of curatorial moves, carried off with both subtlety and precision, were simply not available to the curators at Tate.

 
That said, the selection of the ‘friends’ included, and, indeed, the decision to include friends only, rather than work by other kinds of artistic peers and influences, is not neutral. Firstly, and perhaps surprisingly given Dickerman’s expertise in the area, very little mention is made of works of the earlier European avant-gardes. In fact, little consideration is given overall to the non-American influences on Rauschenberg’s formation, although the exhibition catalogue fills this in to some extent. Duchamp’s presence is not registered until the room dedicated to ‘Performance and Objects’ in the 1960s, whereas in fact the major Dada show that he curated for Sidney Janis Gallery in 1953 had been a powerful influence on Rauschenberg. Indeed, he and Johns had travelled to Philadelphia to visit the Arensberg Collection in 1958. In a similar vein, there is no mention of Kurt Schwitters, a clear precedent for Rauschenberg’s aesthetic, who was represented in the aforementioned 1953 Dada show, and whose major presentation, again at Janis, Rauschenberg had seen (and loved) in 1956. There is no reference to the visit that Twombly and Rauschenberg made to Alberto Burri’s studio while in Rome in 1953, or indeed the Burri exhibition mounted at the Stable Gallery later that same year, which Rauschenberg himself had photographed; nor again, later on, is attention paid to the striking parallels between Rauschenberg’s Cardboards and Venetian series and developments in European art in the late 1960s and early 1970s, even though Sor Aqua (1973) strongly recalls the work of Joseph Beuys and the Cardboards align powerfully with the principles and materials of Arte Povera artists working in Italy.

 
The exhibition’s conceptual framing also tends to lean away from the controversies that Rauschenberg’s works provoked. Little sense is given of the hostile tenor of almost all the reviews he received until 1959 or so (the main exception was the poet Frank O’Hara, who also figures in the exhibition, albeit briefly and, in the main instance, tragically). In the 1950s Rauschenberg’s works were largely read as so many neo-dada pranks and personality gestures (indeed, this objection is still voiced today, most recently by Jed Perl, writing in the New York Review of Books this May). It also served as a lightning rod for an only very thinly veiled homophobia pervading sections of the New York critical establishment, which was of course also rampant throughout the country at large. Perhaps it is not reasonable to expect this kind of content to be included in the show itself. However, some address to the way in which what Lawrence Alloway once called Rauschenberg’s ‘flair for the drastic’ was, at least early on, rarely seen as benign could have been useful here. So too, perhaps, could some sense of the ways in which the artist in fact fell out with many in his closest circle too, especially after his win at Venice in 1964 (itself very controversial, both at home and abroad).
MoMA’s Rauschenberg retrospective coincides with the museum’s major presentation of Louise Lawler’s work, Louise Lawler: WHY PICTURES NOW. In what was presumably a knowing move, the exhibition includes her Persimmon and Bottle (1993/2010), in which Rauschenberg’s silkscreen Persimmon – itself on view next door – is shown, radically cropped, installed in its collector’s apartment. Taking my cue from Lawler, I want to end this review by panning out a little and brushing the celebratory tone somewhat against the grain.

 
Two further exhibitions recently on view in New York also featured works by Rauschenberg, and can be thought of as kinds of brackets to the current retrospective. The first speaks to the artist’s New York formation: Melissa Rachleff’s acclaimed show at NYU’s Grey Art Gallery, Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City 1952-1965. Including a Rauschenberg combine painting, the exhibition and its excellent catalogue convey the extraordinary energy and diversity of the downtown art scene at that time, also highlighting how most of its players are now long forgotten. The second exhibition was presented in the Christie’s showrooms in Rockefeller Plaza, just a few minutes walk from the MoMA: for ten days or so visitors were able to browse the lots for the Postwar and Contemporary Art Evening Sale, which was to be held on 17 May. In the end the star performer in the sale was Cy Twombly’s raucous Leda and the Swan (1962), which was sold for $52,887,500. Rauschenberg’s own Drawings for Dante’s 700th Birthday, made to be reproduced in a special feature of Life magazine in 1965, was one of only a handful of lots to achieve considerably more than double its highest estimated value, finally selling for $2,887,500. This juxtaposition could obviously be the start of an (admittedly fairly familiar) polemic concerning the conversion of downtown grunge into uptown money, as well as concerning an important aspect of the function of major museum retrospectives today; yet its elaboration seems unnecessary here, given the figures. Nevertheless, when assessing the celebration of a modern American master of this calibre and reputation it is useful to keep such dynamics in view, alongside the very considerable achievements of Dickerman’s excellent exhibition itself.

 
Robert Rauschenberg: Among Friends was on view at MoMA until 17 September and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where it will be on view 18 November 2017 – 25 March 2018.

The title of Nolan’s show was derived from a poem by Thomas Hardy, ‘The Darkling Thrush’, written on the cusp of the nineteenth century, in which the sun is described as ‘The weakening eye of day’. This metaphor becomes an emblem of a desolate wintry world, which in turn corresponds with the state of the speaker’s inner life. In the poem, the bleak mood is punctured by the strange song of a thrush, who had chosen ‘to fl ing his soul / Upon the growing gloom.’ Nolan’s exhibition was comprised of four main rooms containing work in a variety of media: mild steel sculptures (freestanding and on plinths); printed text pinned to the wall; modestly scaled paintings on canvas; delicately rendered coloured-pencil drawings; a brightly coloured, hand-tufted wool rug; nine ceramic bowls; and a large-scale digital photograph that covered the last wall (plus a less striking small sculpture of a donkey stationed outside). Linking these rooms were alcoves containing single works, and the exhibition was accompanied by a series of talks, screenings and events, plus a 38-minute audio work written by the artist, available online. These supplements explicitly drew in an array of scientifi c and philosophical ideas that had informed the development of Nolan’s work.

The four rooms charted a narrative of cosmic proportions. The first, titled ‘The visible edge of what can be known’, announced the arrival of the first solid rock on Earth, which for Nolan becomes a metaphor for the beginnings of reflective thought; second, ‘The invisible and the visible’, engaged medieval cosmology as a system for understanding the universe; ‘A structure for reality revealed’ explored scientific methods of observing, measuring and charting of space; and, lastly, ‘The shadow of future events: well what do you expect?’, obliquely, but with a strong deflationary energy, presented the death of the Sun and the end of evolution.

There were twenty works in all, each made as a result of Nolan’s recent residency at IMMA. Sculpture was the dominant medium, and the constant in each room was a biomorphic vegetal form, built from a wire armature coated in plaster, painted, and set onto a handsome stone plinth. These other-worldly protagonists grew in stature as their plinths got taller, until in the final room the support had been toppled. The other work in the exhibition was largely nonfigurative, although the paintings evoke sunrises and sunsets, and the drawings were seemingly made after astronomical photographs; indeed, the idea of a ‘non-figurative’ art was itself put under some pressure by the landscape of concepts spread out around the show, lending a ready set of associations and symbolic possibilities to each piece.

Nolan’s relationship to the history of abstraction becomes significant here: on one hand, she seems fascinated by the cosmic aspirations of late Symbolism and early pioneers of abstract painting (Piet Mondrian before World War I, Robert Delaunay, František Kupka); on the other, her relation to late Modernist and Minimalist sculpture was even stronger. The brightly coloured steel lattices invoked Anthony Caro, and the eponymous work in the final room, The weakening eye of day, perhaps the most impressive moment of the exhibition, recalled the awkward elegance of Eva Hesse’s Hang Up. Here a great spiralling mild steel rod, clad in wadding that has been laboriously hand-stitched by the artist, looped and lolled across the room, like a cosmic force misshapen by fatigue or laughter.

Hesse’s work has a kind of formal irony built into its mode of sincerity; but what is Nolan’s comportment towards the cosmic rhetoric of the Orphists and Theosophists to which her paintings, rugs and drawings seemed to make reference? The potent finale of the last room, in which this spiral girates before a giant photograph of two donkeys confronting us from the graveyard at Bully’s Acre (The view from nowhen, 2014), suggests an ironic and even derisive conclusion to this survey of humanity’s attempts to grasp at ontological mysteries. But the overall tone of the exhibition, and especially its accompanying texts, was one of an avowedly uncynical, unselfconscious embrace of art’s capacity to explore the fascinating productions of science and philosophy.

For me, however, the consistency and force of the exhibition was at times compromised by this same lack of self-consciousness, which sometimes manifested itself in a less rigorous approach. The artist’s parable-like, quasi-scientific, quasiphilosophical written text in the first room, for example, lacked the formal subtlety and boldness characteristic of her sculpture (I thought the latter could have been left to evoke concepts of genesis and reflection without this kind of explicit signalling). Neither, for me, did the three paintings in the exhibition make a substantial address to the medium’s own conventions and history (and I am not sure that this was even their aim). Unlike the drawings, though, they stood up only as elements within the ensemble of the room, rather than hold their own ground as individual artworks (Nolan’s best work does both).

Nevertheless, there was an overall conceptual consistency lent to the various terms by the structure of the exhibition: not that each element stood for a specific concept (the tedium of contemporary art as scientific or philosophical illustration), but that artworks found their place within an ordered arrangement, a composition analogous to a musical work. This was one of Nolan’s main propositions, I felt (and it is by no means hers alone): the exhibition as a figure of thought, a relational space of flexible dimensions that could serve to connect and cohere, imaginatively, the individual elements within it. The last two rooms achieved this particularly powerfully. Abstraction may have lost faith in its own utopian myths, but its capacity to compellingly organise a world of forms and thoughts using a minimum of means continues undiminished.

Caoimhe Kilfeather’s exhibition at TBGS, This attentive place, was curated by Rayne Booth and accompanied by a thoughtful essay by John Hutchinson. It consisted of seven artworks, the most striking of which was at first the least prepossessing. Entering the gallery from the street, the viewer was confronted by a rather dull makeshift wall of thin material hanging in vertical strips from a steel rod above. This screen created a corridor along the inside of the wall-length window, and it was only upon entering the inner space of the gallery that the viewer could turn back to look at the translucent strips of oiled and pigmented paper, and be struck by the luminous way in which they filtered the light of day. Transformed into a subtle gradation of blues, varying in hue and saturation, the fragile paper was not fixed at the bottom, and so was left to respond to the movements of the air as well as changes in daylight. The work is titled, The rigid thing, the moving act, and was made to specifically for the space at TBGS.

Before turning to see this lambent screen, however, the viewer might first have paused to examine one of two large-scale black and white photographs (At the end of his nature [I] and [II]). The second was hung some distance away, but each presented the same carefully-framed scene of patio doors looking onto a paved yard in a state of mild disrepair. This unspectacular scene recalls the courtyards of Pieter de Hooch, working in Delft in the 17th century, which present an outside that is more an extension of the domestic realm, but whose order was always threatened by an encroaching and disruptive nature. Kilfeather’s two images are likewise carefully framed: in one the doors are open, in the other they are closed. This shift changes the image completely, and the images therefore quietly explore what is after all a fundamental spatial opposition.

The most imposing presence in Kilfeather’s exhibition was the enormous, A shade (2014), a dyed cast concrete monolith encircled a few times by a slender brass ribbon. Trapezoid in shape, and measuring 270 x 102 x 79 cm, its ominous blackness was sheer and big and silent. The trompe l’oeil textured surface, which seemed to sag gently as if it were made of plastic netting, disguised a solid, strong, obdurate mass, and lent this looming presence an even more enigmatic air, like something ancestral perhaps.

These works were accompanied by three more modest sculptural pieces: one, a five-part series of intricate grids woven from steel and copper wire, infinitely sensitive to the light and shifts in the viewer’s position; another, a column of white slipcast ceramic tiles, like a delicate and domestic Endless Column. And thirdly, and for me perhaps the most difficult work in the show, The kind thought that sent them there (2014), a drop-leaf wooden table, onto which had been placed four black cast bronze balls, each one hollow, with an aperture and with a distinctive surface texture, not quite natural and not quite artificial. For me this work posed a few too many questions (why that table, why one leaf down, why these textures, why the apertures, why brass, etc), answers to which I was not able to readily derive from the aesthetic and associative qualities of the piece itself.

Together the works evoked the domestic while at the same time keeping to a compressed, at times austere and archaic, formal language. For me, the spareness, potency and intelligence of this presentation were remarkable, conjoining opposing formal, material and conceptual terms: inside and outside, public and domestic, chance and design, movement and stillness, literalism and illusion, light and dark, slightness and monumentality, etc. Again, Hesse was perhaps the most astute post-war sculptor to stage these kinds of compressed formal oppositions, and her spatial sensitivity, extending to an architectural awareness in late works such as Expanded Expansion and Contingent (both 1969), seems a presiding influence on Kilfeather’s work. Indeed, Hesse’s intense investment in the handmade, so different from her Minimalist contemporaries, seems equally crucial to both Kilfeather and Nolan.

Both of these exhibitions achieved a kind of intensity arrived at by other means than personal expressivity. Equally, and importantly, the two presentations did not suppose that the viewer’s encounter with the work would finish when the he or she physically left the space; each courted aesthetic and conceptual reflection as an intrinsic part of the experience of the work, which lasts as long as its mental residues. At their best, both exhibitions achieved a power and complexity that was the opposite of ingratiating.

We first waited in the snug, surrounded by the old décor that has survived the late Mr. and Mrs. Bradley. Mick O’Shea’s subtle sound piece kept the atmosphere quietly animated and off-kilter. When called, we then climbed to the colder upper rooms. In a tight shadowy space Irene Murphy had installed a cluster of small illuminated worlds, on shelves and in cavities under raised floorboards. These small enigmatic groupings of everyday objects pointed to a meaningfulness that was withheld, and invited the production of an imaginary significance that was out of proportion with their literal size.

 
Before long we were ushered up more steep stairs and into the roofspace. There, Bernadette Cronin stood in a greying white wedding dress, dramatically lit in the close space between the rafters. We found our places on makeshift seats only a few feet away, amidst sagging wallpaper and a kitschy religious pictures. Cronin, playing May, then began that strict, metronomic pacing of Footfalls (1975). In her 40s, May ‘has not been out since girlhood’ and confines herself to two repetitious activities: tending her sick mother and walking, backwards and forwards, again and again, in ‘a faint tangle of pale grey tatters’. Cronin’s movements were satisfyingly precise, unflowing, tightly bound and in pieces. Her delivery of Beckett’s intricately crafted text was compelling, although sometimes it was afforded more lyric license than perhaps Beckett himself would have allowed.
 
On the first floor again, a sound piece by Trace accompanied a rendering of Beckett’s Film (1964) by James McCann. Trace gleaned their sounds from the building itself by scratching, scraping and smoothing its physical texture, itself so loaded with imprints of the creaturely routines of everyday lives now past. Aligning nicely, McCann’s Film also used images shot in the Bradley house, amongst others. Corroded, manipulated, set to a Pop-inflected self-destruct, this digital footage overlaid the original Buster Keaton performance, still visible beneath. The effects were both disturbing and enlivening, with conceptual reflexivity and open inter-media experimentation valued over formal stringency.

 
To finish, Máirín Prendergast’s performance of Rockaby (1980) made Beckett’s chilling late play more humanly graspable. Given added charge by its poignant setting, Prendergast’s expressions were intense, startled, desperate. While the atmosphere of despair and alienation was certainly conveyed, for me the emotional demonstration of the performance had the effect, paradoxically, of making the play more palatable and less lacerating: as if the expressive clothing provided some warmth to a text that instead wanted to insist resolutely upon its own cold blood.
 
Intending to dedicate his unfinished and posthumously published Aesthetic Theory to Beckett, Theodor Adorno wrote that in his plays ‘The shabby, damaged world of images is the negative imprint of the administered world. To this extent Beckett is realistic.’ Beckett’s work might be seen as a window onto the bleak affects of our disenchanted world, ones which are most often energetically pasted over with manufactured false consolations. The opposite of the warm, upbeat re-enchantment and accessibility prized by most official arts organisations, this experimental, generous and rare collaborative event plugged Beckett back into precise points in the contemporary world to both critical and fascinating effect.
 

This text was written to accompany an exhibition organised by Charlotte Schepke at Large Glass, London, which set examples of Shearer’s output in conversation with six other contemporary artists. The essay is the first to explore Trevor Shearer’s work, and owes a great debt to conversations and correspondences I had with the artist Alison Turnbull, who was a very close friend of Shearer’s for many years, and who knows his work better than anyone.

Universal Fragments
With scientists’ wire frame mock-ups in mind, Trevor Shearer made Universal Fragments (1998) by casting a bathroom sink using strips of graph paper.1 Graph paper is most often used as a tool of abstraction: of plotting, diagramming and quantification. Here, however, the grids have been torn and bent in the process of being held to the surface of a plain piece of plumbing. Like the tattered remains of that perfect but useless map conceived by Jorge Luis Borges, which had coincided with the territory it described point for point, Shearer’s ragged-edged parts appear as fragile remnants of a representational system exposed to the inclemencies of the elements.2 ‘In spite of my initial reference to computers,’ Shearer wrote of this work, ‘I hadn’t realized that, paradoxically, these fragments would appear archaic, like the remnants of some less advanced technology or maturing big picture.’3 Mounted on the wall, these paper cast-offs are reconfigured, afforded a new sculptural presence and organised into a spiraling formation. The slips and shards of the graph paper fan out and fold back, lining up and overlaying. It is not clear whether they are following a complex orbit around an invisible centre, or whether they have merely been driven into contingent movements by a sudden gust of wind. And so, in a move characteristic of Shearer’s work more broadly, Universal Fragments brings together a series of opposed formal and conceptual terms: archaic and futuristic, fragment and whole, structure and contingency, flat surface and three-dimensions.

The fragments that constitute Mental Exercises (2001-2) refer to a different kind of whole. Consisting of plaster casts of fingers, palms, toecaps and bootheels, which protrude from the wall at precise points, the work engages the viewer’s desire to make sense of the dispersed body parts by imagining an absent figure beyond them. Technically demanding to make, the casts are struck at unusually oblique angles, with unfamiliar sections of hand or boot projecting out an inch or so from the wall. Mental Exercises proposes the body as an object of thought rather than of erotic attachment. Shearer’s toecap is closer to Kahnweiler’s necktie in Picasso’s celebrated cubist portrait from 1910, than to Duchamp’s sexualized casts: it constitutes a brief clue to the disposition of an otherwise invisible body that can take form only in the mind. Indeed, for Shearer, looking always involves a work of intellection, although a part of the thinking that is interwoven with vision is its imaginative and desiring aspect: its fascinations, anticipations and projections. The casts of bodily extremities in Mental Exercises tempt but ultimately frustrate our attempts at what Gestalt theory calls ‘reification’, that constructive aspect of perception that wants to fill in gaps to generate perceptual wholes: finally, these fragments do not quite tally.

Moons

It must be said that the sky’s blue has veered successively towards periwinkle, towards violet … and each time the whiteness of the moon has received an impulse to emerge more firmly… What remains uncertain… is whether this gain in evidence and (we might as well say it) splendor is due to the slow retreat of the sky, which, as it moves away, sinks deeper and deeper into darkness, or whether, on the contrary, it is the moon that is coming forward, collecting the previously scattered light and depriving the sky of it, concentrating it all in the round mouth of its funnel. Italo Calvino, Mr Palomar, 19834

As a sign, the Moon has suffered from over-use: its address to mystery, changeability, femininity, wonder and the like, is as familiar as Stéphane Mallarmé’s worn coin, launched into the night sky. It is difficult to bring it down to earth, but to do so might be the only way to launch it again. In a rebus-like gesture, Trevor Shearer’s Partial Eclipse (of ‘The Riddle of the Universe’) (1999) succeeds by way of a deadpan but enigmatic marriage of the cosmic and the comic. A semi-spherical paper cast swells outwards from the face of an astronomy book opened at its central pages.5 The book and cast are hung vertically on the wall; the cast is as tall as the book and its strange grey objecthood obscures the photographs beneath. Shearer’s work sets in train a series of semiotic games, played out against that interstellar backdrop. Objects from different universes collide: open book and hollow cast; the fantastical orders of magnification required to picture a spiral nebula and the one-to-one literalness of the moulded form.

The lumpen semi-sphere is not all recalcitrance, however: its resemblance to a full moon, with its texture of craters and sea floors, is dumb, obvious, funny.6 The illustrated pages would transport us into space, but the rude object holds us up. In this Partial Eclipse feels of the same spirit as Pense-Bête, the work with which Marcel Broodthaers announced his move from poetry to visual art in 1964 (its title means both aide-mémoire and ‘silly thought’ in French). Broodthaers wedged the fifty remaining copies of his last book of poetry into a ball of plaster, setting up a comic tension between the legibility of the book and the obduracy of the sculptural object. To read would be to destroy the sculpture; to keep the sculpture means foregoing access to the poetry. The tension for Shearer, however, is less between text and object than between object and image: Partial Eclipse signals the reciprocal and contrapuntal relationship between the thick heft of things and imagination’s mobile capacities.

A side note concerning the subtitle: ‘The Riddle of the Universe’ is how the German Die Welträtsel is usually translated. With rather portentous connotations, this conceptual enigma fascinated the likes of Ernst Haeckel, Friedrich Nietzsche and (via the latter) Richard Strauss. Indeed, in Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra (1896) the lack of resolution between the keys of B and C, aimed at representing Man and Nature respectively, has been interpreted as figuring such a fundamental enigma.7 Strauss’ tone poem was famously used by Stanley Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), a film of considerable importance to Shearer, whose unassuming, even deflationary rhetoric nevertheless counters the kind of bombast exemplified by Strauss’ music (Shearer’s preference in that regard was for the Second Viennese School).

Doubles
There is something archaic about the cast, a kind of double achieved by way of a dumb imprint. But doubling can also link up to a futuristic imagination: in cloning and replication, for example. In Plant Casts (1998), Shearer employs several modes of doubling to strange, ricocheting effect. The work is composed of two parts, each of which is a resin cast comprised of two sections made from everyday flora, joined at the stalk. As casts they double the real leaves and flowers from which they derive; each is also a two-part hybrid creation; and, most obviously, there are two of them. Although there is a relation to Vija Celmins’ painted bronze casts of rocks (To Fix the Image in Memory, 1977-82), and to Giuseppe Penone’s model of sculptural work as replication of natural processes (Essere Fiume [To Be River], 1981), these doubles do not compete with the reality of their originals. Shearer’s impossible, spliced hybrids are at once delicate and unsettling. The translucency of the thin resin maintains a relationship with the way that sunlight passes through leaves, but the texture, sheen and almost sickly, otherworldly beige and olive green hues position the Plant Casts as decidedly ‘after nature’.

One of a cluster of Shearer’s works involving doubling, Two Discs (1998) is at once a farewell to vinyl and also suggestive of planetary rings and orbits, lending it a futuristic aspect.8 Two low-fi cardboard discs, each about twelve inches in diameter, are mounted perpendicular to the wall so that they project outwards, one a few inches above and to the side of the other. Each is rendered black with graphite but scored with a set of concentric white rings, made using a turntable, which radiate outwards from the centre, as on an LP record. The doubling of the discs might recall the mechanical shuffle of the jukebox as well as cosmic orbits. The lower disc is less densely packed with lines, and some of the circles orbit a different central point so that they run out of kilter with the rest. An aside to Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs (1935), which themselves were presented on moving turntables, the gyrations of Two Discs are syncopated. Two parts create relations: of harmony and discordance, regularity and divergence, above and below. Here, Shearer uses characteristically simple means to conjure a kind of ‘thinking in circles’, which sets remembered music against the silent trials of sculpture.

Elements

Now, various components of the automatic orchestra were made of bexium, a new metal, chemically endowed by Bex with a prodigious thermal sensitivity… [A]s a result of continuous alterations, the fragments of bexium, acting violently on certain springs, set in motion, and then stopped, one of the claviers, or a group of valves on a horn, and they in turn, at a given moment, were caused to vibrate in the ordinary way by grooved discs.
Raymond Roussel: Impressions of Africa, 1910

Shot in 2009 and re-edited in 2011, the 10-minute looped video Elements, presented on a small monitor, or projected at a similar size onto the wall, shows a close-up of the surface of an electric hotplate on which some water droplets leap, bounce and then vanish.10 The event takes about 35 seconds to elapse. In a suggestive unpublished statement, Shearer described his work in the following way:

The ten-minute video comprises an edited sequence of ever-shortening versions of the event, which then gradually lengthen, like a mirror image in time, and enable the loop to begin again… The sustained, graphic image of the surface of the hotplate reinforces its sculptural dimension in relation to a screen. The elliptically indented surface also suggests, because of its close framing, other stranger associations – lunar crater, amphitheatre, alchemist’s crucible. The structure of repeatedly shortening the filmed event over time is intended to mirror the decay of the droplet itself – perhaps the recorded image is about to disappear as well? When the sequence gradually lengthens the anticipation of the droplet’s returning position is a bit like a child’s memory-game where one attempts to recall objects on a tray that has been removed. These aspects contradict the quasi-scientific language of the filmed event and add another dimension. Watching something exist then cease to exist, and the turbulent changes in between, is engaging, heightened, perhaps, by the event’s transience and scale. The desire to want to see it played out again seems only natural – Elements represents, therefore, a kind of machine that plays with the fulfillment of that desire.11

The luminous brevity of the event, transpiring within this shallow, searing hollow, is captivating. The alchemist’s crucible becomes a dramatic stage on which the spectacle of an elemental gymnastics of extraordinary complexity unfolds. Shearer’s video recalls Étienne-Jules Marey’s photographic experiments presenting the entropic disordering of plumes of smoke as they unfurl around simple obstacles. Here, however, the isolation of a single scene of contingent dynamism offers the raw material for a more complex and reflexive formal structure, which frames, mirrors and augments the original event. The progressive diminution and subsequent re-lengthening of the shot provides a striking formal complement to the diminution of the droplet itself. The intense formal clarity of the video responds qualitatively to the luminous perfection of the droplet, and provides a counterpoint to its chaotic Brownian movements. The quotidian banality of the event – just some water evaporating on an electric hob – is transfigured into a perfect, jewel-like piece of formal construction.

Another aside: in making work, Shearer was fascinated by the possibilities afforded by the adoption of systems of arbitrary constraint. He particularly admired Raymond Roussel’s experimental ‘writing machine’, as well as the formulation of technical constraints, often mathematically derived, by OuLiPo writers.12 Shearer’s library included copies of Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style (1947), as well as eight books by Georges Perec, and twelve by Italo Calvino. Indeed, the development of systems that could provide forms of ‘random order’ to structure the arrival of aleatory phenomena was of particular importance to a series of Shearer’s last works: Dust Music (2012), Forest Film (2012), and 2 Pianos Track Numerous Insects (2012/13). The latter was left unfinished at the time of Shearer’s death.

Animation
In 2010, Trevor Shearer completed Bosch TV, a work consisting of a futuristic casing of laser-cut anodized aluminium housing the looped digital animation of a detail from a painting by Hieronymous Bosch.13 The Bosch painting in question is the left-hand panel of his triptych The Hermit Saints (c.1493), which depicts Saint Anthony of Egypt. The creature that Shearer extracted is a strange, spoon-billed hybrid sporting knee-length black boots and jauntily engaged in catching a lizard. Shearer presents this little monster, now a white figure on a black ground, endlessly walking in a circle around the screen, repeatedly scooping up its prey and shooting the viewer a quick glance before continuing along on its looped perambulations.

Joseph Koerner has described Bosch as having articulated his fantastical inventions with remarkable precision:

[Bosch’s] objects seem somehow carefully observed, even when they cannot be, since there is no real-world prototype for them… By engaging with how a thing is put together, Bosch can rebuild it as he wishes, constructing especially those places of improbable but somehow visibly plausible attachment whereof his hybrids consist… Bosch makes exact fantasies.14

Shearer shared in Bosch’s fascination with how things were put together, and with the minutiae of technical problem solving; the sheer volume of drawings, drafts, maquettes and calculations that preceded the final execution of this work attest to this enthusiasm. Here, painting is transmuted into animation, which is then hybridized with sculpture. Bosch TV arrives as a capsule in which discrete layers of historical time have been superimposed.

Much earlier, in 1998, Shearer described his works as ‘fictions that I hope connect with the idea of a mutable and slightly vertiginous reality.’15 The Borgesian resonance is apt here, as this animated creature could happily find its place in the author’s The Book of Imaginary Beings (1957).16 The protagonist’s endless and pointless circulation might suggest a bleak outlook, a pessimistic statement of the impossibility of breaking out of repetitive, creaturely patterns of existence. However, not only is Shearer’s creature evidently not unaware of its viewer, but the very fact of this extraordinary work of re-imagining is eloquent of an inventive power that works against the kind of circularity it stages.

Light
It would be too grand and declarative to say that there was a ‘return to painting’ in Trevor Shearer’s work over the last years of his life. Although painting gained a renewed prominence in his output after about 2004, it was a constant reference point since he studied painting at art school in the 1980s. The immediate, emergent responsiveness of painting – as opposed to the necessity of calculating all the specifics of a work before it was fabricated – became of particular importance to him.17 Indeed, as a side note, while I have largely been situating Shearer’s practice in relation to moments from the history of avant-garde art and literature, it is important to keep in mind that his work also emerged out of more immediate, intuitive responses to the physical environment of East London, where he lived and worked.18

An important moment in painting’s return to prominence within Shearer’s output seems to have been a series of works that he made on sheets of acetate in 2004, perhaps with Jasper Johns in mind.19 Shearer’s working title for these experiments was The Clearing, which he described in this way:
The Clearing is a provisional title that links with:
i) clearing the decks – the making way for new things.
ii) an opening in a forest – an expansion spatially.
iii) the idea of transparency, materially and conceptually, in relation to looking through and beyond.20

In a note from 2005, Shearer described his work as concerned with ‘the possibilities that arrive through improvisation. Not knowing is a part. Lightness is a part’.21 Here he was referring to a lightness that enabled the ‘freeing up of information – and ideas’, but in considering two of his most fully realized recent works in painting, Yellow Painting (2011) and Silver Birch (2012), it is the effects of the curiously unplaceable light and hue that are arguably the most striking elements.22

The means of making light strange are very openly declared in Silver Birch. A vertical stand supports a lamp that shines a circular beam of ultra violet light onto the centre of a canvas painted silver. Down the middle of the picture runs a meticulously rendered section of a silver birch trunk. Shearer takes this wintry emblem of archaic myth and pagan lore and lends it the quality of a futuristic enigma, the canvas reflecting back a light that is at once cool and hot, illuminating and obscuring. Yellow Painting derives from the meticulous translation of a sustained perceptual engagement with a crumpled sheet of A4 paper the colour of a Post-it note. The depicted creases construct a tectonic landscape of articulated planes, with something of the ridged hardness of a rock face made over into an alien yellow. In his celebrated long poem, ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’, which sets off from an encounter with the eponymous painting by Parmigianino, John Ashbery describes ‘A perverse light whose / Imperative of subtlety dooms in advance its / Conceit to light up’.23 That is what Shearer’s painting seems to aim at: light made strange as it reflects from the most banal, throwaway object subjected to an unusually prolonged effort of attention. The paper sheet will be scrunched up and discarded, and Yellow Painting’s anchorage to the world of visible and tangible things will be loosened. What is left are the variations of an other-worldly yellow, like that of Caspar David Friedrich’s Large Enclosure (c.1832), which continues to emit the strangeness and opacity of a world from which the veneer of familiar human consolations has fallen away.24

NOTES
1 Trevor Shearer, ‘Notes on Work’, 5 January 1998 (unpublished).
2 Jorge Luis Borges, ‘On Exactitude in Science’ (1946), Collected Fictions. Translated by Andrew Hurley. London: Penguin, 1999, 325.
3 Trevor Shearer, ‘Notes on Work’, 5 January 1998 (unpublished).
4 Italo Calvino, Mr Palomar. Translated by William Weaver, London: Random House, 1985, 31-2.
5 The book is W.M. Smart’s The Riddle of the Universe. London: Longmans, 1968.
6 A related work is Shearer’s Moon (1998), which is comprised of a disc of stretched white vinyl, which buckles and warps as if viewed through water.
7 See Norman Del Mar, Richard Strauss. A Critical Commentary On His Life and Works, Volume 1. London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1986, 132ff. In 1927, Strauss told his friend Romain Rolland that he was aiming to express ‘the hero’s inability to satisfy himself, either with religion or science or humour, when confronted with the enigma of nature.’ Quoted by Michael Kennedy, Richard Strauss: Man, Musician, Enigma. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, 112.
8 Shearer made numerous works involving the act of doubling. These include an earlier series of painted mirrored duplications of postcards (Merimbula, Needles and Wooler, all ca.1992-93), and two later works more closely related to Plant Casts and Two Discs: Losing My Grip (2001) and Calocoat (2002). Shearer was also evidently fascinated by artworks involving mirror images, writing a short commentary upon Michel Foucault’s famous discussion of Velázquez’s Las Meninas (unpublished note, 2008), and expressing particular admiration for John Ashbery’s long poem, ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’, which he included when asked by artist Kathryn Faulkner to name his twenty most significant books. See Kathryn Faulkner, Bibliography 2 (Artists Writers Photographers). London, 2009, unpaginated.
9 Raymond Roussel, Impressions of Africa. Translated by Rayner Heppenstall. Richmond: Alma Classics, 2011, 30.
10 At his death, Shearer also left some unedited digital footage of an electric bar fire. Related to Elements, this footage was also shot in a defamiliarizing close-up, the stationary camera recording the increasingly chromatic intensity of the bars as they heat up.
11 Letter to the author, 30 October 2011. This aspect of anticipation and desire in the viewing of the moving image was approached from another angle in an unrealized proposal for a short film entitled Cinema from 2003: ‘I am interested in the feeling of anticipation that cinemas generate before a performance and the atmosphere that is created. The idea for the film is to evoke this in as simple a way as I can… The very short films (3-5 minutes) will focus on the curtains, lighting, incidental music and the variety of fade-outs that lead up to the revealing of the screen… Each film will consist of one centrally fixed shot, with no camera movement… Despite these restraints, but perhaps because of them, I think the cumulative effect of these repetitions will be interesting and show something of the seduction of the cinema environment in a focused way.’
12 In the same statement quoted above, Shearer wrote, ‘At the time of making [Elements] I was rather obsessed with the strange and experimental literary machines employed by the French writer Raymond Roussel.’ Letter to the author, 30 October 2011.
13 The working title of this piece had been ‘History’ (conversation with Alison Turnbull, 27 July 2013).
14 Joseph Leo Koerner, ‘Bosch’s Equipment’, in Lorraine Daston (ed.), Things That Talk – Object Lessons from Art and Science. New York: Zone Books, 2004, 54-5.
15 Trevor Shearer, ‘Notes on Work, 5 January 1998’ (unpublished).
16 Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Imaginary Beings. London: Penguin, 2006.
17 In an email to Alison Turnbull in November 2004, Shearer wrote, ‘Sometimes when there have been scrappy things (bits of acetate tests) in situ the full, ‘finished’ thing seems too complete – too much. Adapting to that I find difficult… [B]ut that’s the good thing about painting – things emerge, you don’t have to live quite so anxiously in the world of ‘projections’?’
18 Shearer’s working notes and photographs attest to his responsiveness to this urban environment, with particular places and details around Hackney, Mile End and Morning Lane, for example, prompting ideas for new and ongoing projects.
19 Shearer owned a copy of the 1996 volume, Jasper Johns: Writings, Sketchbook Notes, Interviews (ed. Kirk Varnedoe, New York: The Museum of Modern Art). In a list entitled ‘Things to think about’ dated July 21 2004, Shearer wrote ‘Johns’ ‘Watchman’ detail (3 rectangles?) – images on acetate, copies of images (painted) on acetate.’ This note relates to a three-part work on acetate from 2005 entitled Ice/Medusa/Iraq, in which Shearer over-painted printed images of Caspar David Friedrich’s The Sea of Ice (1823-24), Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa (1818-19), and a photograph from the most recent Iraq War.
20 This unpublished note is titled ‘The Clearing’ and dated 2004/5.
21 Trevor Shearer, unpublished note, 2005.
22 This was evidently something that tended to strike Shearer in the work of others too. Having just seen Giotto’s fresco cycle in Padua for the first time, for example, he remarked on how the paintings ‘exude light in an unpredictable way.’ Email to Alison Turnbull, 4 November 2003. Indeed, Shearer displayed his interest in recording his sustained perceptual engagements with
the natural world in a series of texts, written towards an ultimately unrealised project entitled ‘Silent Pool’, in late autumn 2001. One
text, ‘Silent Pool: Friday 2.11.01 3.35pm – 4.50pm’, ends in this way: ‘The fallen leaves that lay against the few clumps of reeds are also gaining in brightness. Their colour is becoming richer too as a slight, almost imperceptible, amber glow is coming from the sky behind. Strangely this glow is much more noticeable when looking at the gravel path than at the sky. The debris of partially rotting leaves that are trampled into the path on the right now seem to be glowing, even the dark gravel path itself is changing. The far end of the pool is now a dark green black. It has become very cold.’
23 John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Manchester: Carcanet New Press, 1975, 70. See note 8.
24 According to Alison Turnbull, Shearer’s 1998 visit to the eau de nil room of Friedrichs in the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen in Dresden, where this painting is housed, provided him with one of his most inspiring and sustaining encounters with art. Email to the author, 22 August 2013.

The galleries were punctuated by some extraordinary juxtapositions of Venetian masterpieces with major paintings by Manet. The most feted of these, arriving in Room 2, saw Manet’s Olympia (1863) finally hang next to its most explicit point of art historical reference, Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538). When Olympia was first exhibited, at the Paris Salon in 1865, it precipitated a notoriously violent public reaction; since being acquired by the French state in 1890 it had not left Paris, so its presence in Venice was a major coup. The comparison of Olympia with Titian’s Venus has long been fundamental to the teaching of Art History, and the prospect of seeing the two paintings side by side was exhilarating. All of Manet’s most celebrated interruptions and subversions were of course in evidence: the direct but inscrutable gaze replacing the enticements of Titian’s Venus; Olympia’s famous left hand, transformed from autoeroticism into a sign of self-possession, disbarring access; the startled cat substituting for Titian’s sleepy symbol of fidelity; the black maidservant’s presentation of a client’s gift of flowers, casting Olympia as a modern prostitute and upending the meaning of the Titian’s marriage chest.

With the actual paintings before you, however, other less familiar details become newly visible: the slight increase in scale of Manet’s painting, and his distancing of the figure from the picture plane; the luminous pink of the black maidservant’s dress, rendering Olympia’s flesh flatter and greener by comparison; the studied way in which Olympia’s hair is a slightly redder brown than the background panel, indicating that she wears it down, which brings with it associations of female sensuality; and the way in which the pink toes of her right foot poke out from behind the left, an odd and almost caricatural detail.

Olympia was one of Manet’s most aggressive moves, and the one that had the most dramatic contemporary impact. The precision with which he both evoked and cancelled key aspects of Titian’s iconic portrayal of an available, desirable femininity revealed by precise interruptions the sexualized economy of viewing in the 19th century Parisian Salon. The magnificence of Titian’s painting, while undeniable, is re-cast by Manet’s move, and is not in a position to provide answers to this particular kind of interrogation (not that Titian is under attack here; it is rather the endless parade of 19th century academic nudes at the Salon that Manet’s painting exposes).

Other juxtapositions were less familiar, however, and all the more energizing for their suggestiveness and originality. For me, the most compelling of these was found in Room 7, where Manet’s Portrait of Emile Zola (1868) was placed next to Lorenzo Lotto’s extraordinary Portrait of a Young Gentleman in his Study (c.1530). The latter normally hangs in the Accademia in Venice, and we can assume that Manet had seen it on at least one of his three visits to the city (in 1853, 1857 and 1874). If Titian provided a paragon to be subverted, Lotto’s less famous and more enigmatic painting offered instead a kind of aesthetic and conceptual companion, and the juxtaposition reminds us of the wealth of conventions on which Manet could draw for the depiction of the male intellectual. Zola’s recently published pamphlet on Manet’s art was displayed together with some other contemporary publications in a cabinet nearby, an example of the discrete but precise way in which historical connections were drawn by the curators. (Manet’s exquisite diminutive portrait of Stéphane Mallarmé [1876] was also brilliantly placed close by, on a wall adjacent to the Zola).

The relationship of Manet’s Zola to Lotto’s painting is more oblique and glancing, usefully suggesting that Manet’s absorption of art history operated by way of allusive assimilation as much as by direct quotation. The comparison seemed precisely aimed, though, however speculative a claim for specific lines of influence might be. The comparison rendered certain details strangely resonant: the brightly lit foreheads in each case, a sign of a capacious intelligence; the way in which Lotto’s window, opening onto a landscape beyond, is replaced in the Manet by a Japanese screen which also represents a landscape; and, in particular, the extraordinary chromatic rhymes across both canvases, of the most subtle powder blues, sweeping from the bottom right to top left of Lotto’s painting, returning in the pictures and pamphlets in the top right of the Manet, and again in the border of the Japanese screen to Zola’s left.

This way in which the precise calibration of formal and aesthetic elements (and their relationships) functions to establish painting’s particular form of intelligence – an intelligence from which sensuous moments have not been expelled – was also demonstrated by Manet’s stunning Le Balcon (1868- 69). Although the juxtaposition with Carpaccio, while intriguing, was not perhaps as compelling a comparison as those already discussed (the prime importance of Goya’s The Majas at the Balcony is hard to displace here), Manet’s painting was beautifully integrated into the exhibition more broadly. Again, chromatic repetitions are striking: in the unreal intensity of the emerald green describing the balcony, the shutters, the parasol and Berthe Morisot’s neck ribbon. One particularly resonant detail when face to face with the painting was the relationship between the three main characters’ facial expressions and their by-turns tense and truant hands. The right hand of the central figure as he clutches his lapel; the oddly taut fingers of Morisot’s left hand; and, especially, the involuntary burrowings and fumblings of the gloved hands of the woman on the right, rendered by Manet in an extraordinary salmon pink. These details, brought out by Manet’s painterly facture, augment the sense of dislocation here: not only are the figures lost to each other, but they somehow feel internally dissociated, the body absently engaged while the mind is elsewhere.

These exceptional moments were joined by others: a room of spare and lovely still life paintings, a powerfully grouped set of works relating to the last ordeals of Christ, and a room acknowledging the profound influence of Spain (dominated by the striking Fifer of 1866). But Manet was not always great, and this exhibition was nicely unprecious in its inclusion of weaker moments, moments when we feel the artist less invested, less concentrated, less innovative and stringent.

The show begins and ends rather modestly, for example: Rooms 1, 8 and 9 did not deliver the kind of riveting encounters available in the other rooms (Room 9, entitled ‘The Boundless Sea’, for example, was really only an occasion to present Manet’s one great painting of Venice itself, The Grand Canal, Venice [1874]). But in a way this measure of inconsistency seemed to suit the presentation rather than detract from it: Manet’s lack of aesthetic preciousness and consistency felt experimental, inviting, invigorating.

It is perhaps true that Manet: Return to Venice benefitted from what was a rather underwhelming Biennale this year. Such foils not withstanding, however, Manet’s oeuvre continues to prove able to yield fresh insights and unexpected encounters. The Palazzo Ducale show was particularly original and effective in this respect, and made the Royal Academy’s Manet: Portraying Life, staged in London earlier this year, seem unfocused and even a little opportunistic by comparison. In the current show Manet’s extraordinary combination of disruptive criticality, aesthetic richness, conceptual sophistication, historical acumen and technical bravura were amply and inspiringly demonstrated.

Manet: Return to Venice was organized in collaboration with the Museé d’Orsay and the Fondazione Civici Musei di Venezia, and was on view 24 April – 1 September 2013. Ed Krčma is Lecturer in History of Art at University College Cork, and co-editor of Enclave Review.

As with the earlier section centring on sexuality, towards the end of the show figuration, or rather disfiguration, afforded the curators a means of focusing their engagement with politics. Here the selection was dominated by British and North American artists, with Fernando Bryce (a Peruvian who lives in Berlin) the only exception. Indeed, this Anglophone bias was present throughout the exhibition and, while it might have been more explicitly negotiated, the resulting, more limited claim of the show lent it coherence. The central object of concern here was not any specific political event, position, or mode of activity, but rather the formal and technical disordering of our image of the body as it is ravaged, flattened and convulsed by war, violence, exploitation, and psycho-social malaise. Bryce was at a remove in the soberness of his archival retrieval and transcription of images and documents of loaded historical significance. Two works by Raymond Pettibon provided a bridge to the rest. Pettibon also appropriates the languages other media (here, comic books, amongst other things), bringing jarring, staccato drawings together with provocative, oblique, and blackly humorous text, the voice of which is never clear. Nancy Spero, Leon Golub and Peter Kennard variously distress the surfaces onto which they work, each contributing new means for the expression of rage and indignance at the ideological wars and exploitation attending the development of post-war capitalism. Across the room was the stunning third ‘Documentation’ of Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (1973-79). These coloured sheets, scrawled on by her infant son and then written over by the artist, when experienced in the flesh rather than via the black and white reproductions of her well-known book, deliver a more lively and affectively ambiguous charge than her reputation for stern analysis might suggest. Margaret Harrison’s sexualized, hallucinatory drawings of ludicrously excessive ciphers of femininity (Banana Woman, 1971), added a barbed humour while also helping to make the feminist context of Kelly’s work explicit.

 
A more sustained treatment of a particular political, social and psychological formation (apartheid in South Africa) was offered at the end of the exhibition by three of William Kentridge’s celebrated Drawings for Projection. In Felix in Exile (1994), the exiled character Felix Teitelbaum sits naked in a cheap hotel room contemplating a suitcase full of drawings. These sheets, depicting the traumas of apartheid, become animated under Felix’s gaze, flying onto the bare walls around him. Their resulting configuration, together with Felix huddled on a simple chair in the corner of the room, explicitly evokes the famous installation photograph of Kasimir Malevich’s legendary 0:10 – Last Futurist Exhibition, held in Petrograd in December 1915. That exhibition represents a key moment from the historical avant-garde, in which abstract art seemed to have prefigured the utopian drive of revolutionary politics. Unlike the elemental clarity of Malevich’s paintings, however, Kentridge’s scene is marked by a texture of smudges and erasures. These celebrated works, which recall graphic languages associated with social satire and political protest (Goya, Daumier, Grosz, Beckmann), were made by recording the erasure and reworking of charcoal drawings with a film camera. They are palimpsests in which there is a drag or weight placed upon processes of change. Here the dream of pure beginnings is abandoned, or, perhaps better, mourned.
 
For Kentridge, the process of drawing is the engine of change in his films, which nevertheless refer explicitly to their contemporary situation in South Africa. As in the exhibition as a whole, drawing is not claimed as a catalyst for social and political change, at least not in any direct way. That avant-garde aspiration for art is mourned rather than re-enacted here. Indeed, drawing’s conventionally more modest and minor status lends itself instead to furthering more internal, reflexive concerns. This does not mean, however, that it is not a powerful and affecting means to work through our social, political and psychic condition. While drawing is perhaps closer to thinking and reflection than to action, more a part of the vita contemplativa than the vita active, it might still help to show a way forward – like a map or a diagram – by way of imaginative engagement and conceptual extension.
 
Tracing the Century did not provide a history of twentieth-century drawing. Indeed, such a history does not yet exist: there is currently no adequate account of twentieth-century drawing, although such large-scale exhibitions as this (and MoMA’s On Line, for example) are leading the way towards one. But this show did not claim to provide a history as such: chronology was abandoned in favour of clusters and constellations, and references to historical moments and trajectories were at a minimum. In the end, the history of twentieth century art looks less rather than more coherent following this exhibition; the curators have sought to shake up familiar sets of associations and to suggest certain affinities and connections aside from broader, more stable trajectories. The result is a loss in the falling away of some kinds of logic, which would perhaps have located the extraordinary formal innovations on view here more firmly, but a gain in re-staging the kinds of associative liveliness and flexible insight that many artists talk of as characteristic of the drawing process itself.
 
 
Tracing the Century: Drawing as a Catalyst for Change was on view, 16 November 2012 – 20 January 2013. It was accompanied by the solo exhibition, Matt Saunders: Century Rolls.

Part two began with the seminal 1973 critique of corporate media by Richard Serra and Carlota Fay Schoolman, Television Delivers People. To muzak accompaniment, text scrolls up the screen consisting of consciousness-raising, demystifying slogans about the evils of a commodified media. This work feels a bit dated, even if its fundamental messages are no less relevant or urgent. What particularly struck me was the way in which the artists comfortably decried what happens to ‘you’ owing to the impact of TV, without having themselves implicated: ‘What goes on over the news is what you know / It is the basis by which you make your judgements, by which you think.’ I’m not sure whether today’s artists would feel comfortable casting such verdicts upon their audience without including themselves in the list of those subjected in this way.

 
Television Delivers People provided a polemical frame for perhaps the most challenging film of the evening, the Heins’ 625, 1969, which consists of 34 minutes of static or ‘snow’ filmed from a TV set, together with sound derived from the pictured light levels, via a photoresistor. This sustained presentation of modulated sonic and visual interference certainly changes the structure of one’s attentiveness. Its sheer, opaque resistance to representation, and the apparent lack of action on screen, encouraged the viewer to register instead more unfamiliar kinds of sensory variation – a different visual and sonic incident. The senses felt keener afterwards, and I was imagining the value that an image would have had, had one been introduced, within what became a more (and not less) sensitive field of energetic potential. While 625 does not lend itself to the conveyance of explicit critical ‘messages’, as might be suggested by its juxtaposition with the Serra and Schoolman film, it was instructive to see different materialisms collide: that of a Marxist critique of the ideological power of the media, and that of a structural film confronting the basic physical properties of its medium. Indeed, the Heins’ enterprise might usefully be aligned with Serra’s own practice as a sculptor and draughtsman in their shared rawness of negotiation of perceptual and embodied experience.
 
In comparison to 625, Thorsten Fleisch’s Energie!, 2007, which also presents the precipitations of deranged televisual apparatuses, felt paradoxically contrived in its beauty and psychedelic appeal. Likewise, the stroboscopic montages and more straightforwardly thematic exploration of the subjective bases of vision in Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller’s Contre-Jour felt somehow too controlled and deliberate here. Perhaps this was a delayed effect of the brute negative capacities of the Hein films, however, which continued in their Weissfilm [White Film], 1977. This was an apposite work to finish with, given its reduction to a kind of absolute openness and negation. It signaled, as had Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings of 1951, an endgame in the drive to expose the specificity of the medium. As John Cage once said of Rauschenberg’s paintings, they constitute ‘airports for the lights, shadows and particles’, and the transparent leader of the Heins’ film continues to accrue dust and scratches each time it is exposed to the world, like a net of contingency.
 
Wüst offered us the rare chance to encounter such engaging and provocative films. While the early works, necessarily perhaps, cannot shock in the same way today as they did upon their initial reception, they remain potent and unexpected for other, perhaps more compelling reasons. Their mixture of weirdness and conviction still provides the potential for genuinely differential experience; and these enlivening opportunities are arguably less available today than they were in 1970, now that the effects of corporate media are even more pervasive, and the drive to instrumentalize experience even more relentless.
 
 
White Noise was screened on 22 September 2012. Black Sun was founded by Vicky Langan in 2009; its film programmes are curated by Max Le Cain.

Fletcher’s skill throughout the biennial was to articulate art’s critical potential – especially in political terms – whilst also maintaining a varied yet coherent sense of what the specific contribution of art, as distinguished from say photojournalism or political campaigning, might yet be. This had not only to do with overt expressions of protest, but also with the affirmation of alternative, less instrumental ways of thinking; of an enlivened attention to the material fabric of everyday life; and of an unruly way of drawing images and things into the charged field between thought and sensation.

That the concern with politics would not be trained upon class and economics alone was immediately evident upon entering Limerick City Gallery of Art. Iveković’s Shadow Report (the first manifestation of which appeared in 1998) straight away brings the issue of violence against women in Ireland into visibility. Strewn across the floor of the first room, and scattered further afield by the time of my second visit, were scores of scrunched up pieces of red paper printed with a disturbing report provided by the National Women’s Council of Ireland. These crumpled sheets, coloured an angry red and casually kicked and buffeted around the gallery, constituted a precarious yet indignant gesture; and its weight became more insistent as it was encountered repeatedly throughout eva’s main exhibition spaces.

Iveković’s piece provided a frame for understanding the formally very different work of Kate Davis in an adjacent room. Curtain I-VII (Die Schönste Frau in der Geschichte der Mythologie) (2011) comprised seven copies of a poster of Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus, with a differently degraded image of the infamous slash made by suffragette Mary Richardson in 1914 superimposed onto each. Here Davis alerts us both to art’s historical complicity with patriarchal forms of representation, and to examples of radical, violent models of spectatorship. Which is more precious, the rights of Emmeline Pankhurst – ‘the most beautiful character in modern history’ – or a painting of ‘the most beautiful woman in mythological history’?

Also at the LCGA was a suggestive juxtaposition of three artworks exploring the basic operations of architectural, semiotic and pedagogic structures. Emma Houlihan’s stark, cast concrete Arch (2010) presented a monument to the utter failure of social cohesion attending the progress of the Celtic Tiger. The arch, dependent for its defeat of gravity on the mutual support of each stone by its neighbours, is here reduced to a lumpen rubble of disassembled units. This work shared a space with Broodthaers’ slide piece, Images d’Épinal (1974). Broodthaers sequenced images from mid-nineteenth century lithographs produced in the French town of Épinal, pictures that became so popular that image d’Épinal is still used in French as a synonym for the stereotyped image. It is from such images that as children we learn to connect words with images and things: the world becomes intelligible, but only by way of our submission to systems of classification and stereotyping that are implicated in the exercise of power. Broodthaers alludes to this discursive function while also reveling in the suggestive potential of the juxtaposition of these image-emblems. Pedagogy, classification, rudimentary architecture and an interrogation of creative expression are enfolded in a third work in this cluster: Priscila Fernandes’ Product of Play (2011). This video projection observes a boy arranging a set of coloured building bricks and an older girl who, having riotously scattered a set of such blocks, laughs playfully before uncannily breaking into the song of a trained operatic voice. Here the disciplinary shaping of children produces unsettling results.

I found the remaining works downstairs at LCGA a little less convincing. Pilvi Takala’s The Trainee (2008) documents a performative attempt to disturb the smooth running of the marketing department of Deloitte, during which the artist lingered in odd places (she spent one day in a lift, for example) and conspicuously performed no tasks. While her presence certainly provoked concerned reactions from her co-workers, these were not of a particularly surprising kind, and the artist seemed rather too keen to alert the other employees to her odd, Bartleby-like behaviour for it all to avoid the air of self-conscious wackiness. Anibal Catalan’s site-specific installation, Morphological Zone (2011-12), which combined pictorial, sculptural and architectural elements, carried some of the formal dynamism of Russian Constructivism. However, almost 100 years on, and with those forms of immersive dynamic abstraction so familiar to design and product showrooms, the utopian charge of the original avant-garde project does not carry over here. Upstairs at the LCGA, however, Hyewon Kwon’s unemphatic video, Untitled ♯1 (2010-11), was particularly powerful. Kwon looped some archival footage filmed in Seoul’s Municipal Workers’ Dormitory in 1962 with various newsreel voiceovers and musical scores. These offered dramatically different narratives and, oddly and disturbingly, the footage was able to act as convincing backdrop to each one.

Moving away from the LCGA, Marcus Coates’ video The Plover’s Wing (The Palestinian/Israeli Crisis) (2008), on view at the Belltable, was absurd, bewildering and provocative, but not very good. Coates, dressed in a light blue Adidas tracksuit, wearing a badger skin on his head, and with a stuffed hare’s head poking out of his jacket, is meeting with Moti Sasson, mayor of the Israeli city of Holon. Coates, earnest in both his published interviews and on-screen demeanour, offers his shamanic services to Sasson, and the wisdom derived from his access to the world of animal spirits. We see an apparently sincere Coates act out his entry into this world and, returning back to us after a staccato sequence of shrieks and grunts, he brings with him the tale of the plover bird, the behaviour of which he then allegorizes to inform the mayor that Israel has a victim complex. Not perhaps the most subtle piece of political analysis ever delivered, and Sasson, a bit bewildered but remaining surprisingly well disposed, does not feel the need to ask Coates any further questions. Like an imagined meeting of Joseph Beuys, Ali G and The Mighty Boosh, the piece carried considerable entertainment value, and was certainly more telling than the ignorable work on the 10th floor of Riverpoint. Here, José Carlos Martinat’s Vandalized Monuments: Power Abstraction 4 (2012), like many relational artworks, failed to deliver on the liberatory claims made on its behalf.
Along with the LCGA, eva’s second major exhibition space was 103-104 O’Connell Street. Dozens of artworks were installed over four floors and, while not all the juxtapositions were equally illuminating, there were some brilliant moments. The different floors were linked by the recurrence of Iveković’s Shadow Report, and by the lengthy interviews filmed by Fergus Daly and Katherine Waugh (of the latter, the one featuring Sylvère Lotringer was particularly compelling).

Seeing Mark O’Kelly’s work on the 2nd floor made me aware of how little painting featured in the exhibition, although the slow tempo of Ailbhe Ní Bhriain’s digital video collages elicited the kind of prolonged, decelerated attention often characteristic of that medium. On the 1st floor a spare, elegant sculpture by Greg Howie, simply titled ( (2011), used ratchet straps to bend a sheet of glass into a shallow arc, its curve supplying enough stability for the sheet to stand precariously upright. Attending to this work – a combination of ubiquitous building materials and a delicate formal solution – made me suddenly more alive to the nature of materials. The tension, poise and spareness of this piece approached something of the charge of Tatlin’s revolutionary experiments, which Catalan’s more spectacular installation at LCGA failed to achieve.

Art’s proximity to political activism was perhaps closest in Zanny Begg and Oliver Resler’s satisfyingly outraged film, The Bull Laid Bare (2012). Effective as a mode of consciousness-raising, its formal innovations were enlisted in the service of reinforcing the exposure of the psychopathic logic of corporate capitalism, and its devastating effects on the Irish economy. In comparison, Sarah Pierce’s It’s Time Man, It Feels Imminent (2008) was much more sober and reflexive, seemingly driven less by an agitational agenda and more by an interest in interrogating the relationship of Conceptual Art to contemporaneous moments of popular political protest. While Pierce’s project felt rather knowing and careful, her interview with Mary Kelly, in which the latter remarks upon the replacement of the slogan, ‘Make love not war’ by the blunter imperative to ‘Stop the war, have sex!’ rivets us to the texture of language and its importance for activist protest.

For me, however, the most potent artwork in the biennial was the haunting, enlivening slide piece by KwieKulik, Activities with Dobromierz (1972-4). Here the long-marginalized experimental Polish artists Przemysław Kwiek and Zofia Kulik took nearly 900 photographs in which their own infant son appears positioned alongside various everyday household and natural objects. The means are very modest (a baby, a blanket, some onions, some ice, a bucket, etc.), and the spatial and relational propositions very systematic (the artists were reading the linguistic theory of Adam Weinsberg); but the visual, psychological and conceptual effects of seeing this baby uncannily made over into something like a lexical unit were both unsettling and somehow visionary. The rigours of logic, set theory and linguistic typology are held up against the affective dynamics of family life and the crystalline beauty of natural fragments. Dobromierz returns the viewer’s gaze, but blankly, as he is taken up in the ambitious (and sometimes disturbing) experimental games of his parents, who were forced to explore the universal in private, excluded as they were from the public sphere by a cruelly bureaucratic and repressive state apparatus.

The preponderance of lengthy video pieces in Fletcher’s show might have seemed odd, given Berardi’s emphasis on the importance of taking control of one’s own experience of time. The open temporality of the sculptural pieces, however, made up for the absence of painting in this regard, and the predominance of the projected image also leant the installation a presentational coherence. Characterised by aesthetic conviction and ethical commitment, the best moments of the biennial offered encounters that were both arresting and galvanizing. At these points, contemporary art’s ability to maintain contact with broader social and political dynamics was affirmed, without it becoming a mere instrument of other kinds of project.

eva International – After the Future was on view 19 May – 12 August 2012.

The work’s lack of rhetoric (of pathos, of redemption, of mourning) allows it a conceptual mobility that avoids any mooring to a familiar emotional freight of melancholy and remorse. Although not absolutely separable, Evening Echo has little to do with the necessarily unyielding austerity of the monuments of Rachel Whiteread (Vienna) and Daniel Libeskind (Berlin) to the horrors of industrialized genocide. (It is clear, however, that the artist is not innocent of the coincidence of ‘Shalom Park’ and ‘Gas Works Road’ in the newspaper notice). Where there is emphasis here, it is as much upon contingency and provisionality as it is on the work of mourning. Instead, it is not at all clear whether this work is oriented toward the past or toward the future; whether it is a marker of pathos (in its modesty and brevity) or a lightning rod for future gatherings. That emotional ambivalence (rather than indifference) lends the work more not less potential, allowing it to operate in different registers at once and for different people. That the work is constituted by several very different parts means that it does not fully ‘reside’ anywhere. In this, Leach continues to work within the tradition of Conceptual Art’s ‘dematerialization’ of the art object, which need not signal the abandonment of art’s material aspect, but suggests rather that the identity and cohesiveness of the work is not given by its location in any one place. Operating on a vastly dilated timescale, that identity will be formed over the decades in the minds of its viewers via numerous acts of reception, and the network of meanings, experiences and associations into which those acts fold. Who, after all, will see this ninth lamp during its brief periods of illumination? Will it be recognized? What will it trigger? How will it be understood? To those that only know about it and do not see it, the work can operate (or perhaps rather echo) as an idea and can be dwelt upon in the absence of any direct experience.

 
The perceptual effects of Evening Echo are indeed slight – an inconspicuous newspaper notice, a small number of unemphatic posters, three extra park lamps that could easily be overlooked or misrecognized as a small effort at urban regeneration – but the conceptual reverberations, when attended to, are potentially very powerful and far-reaching. In line with a religious tradition of resistance to ‘graven images’ and an emphatic prioritizing of the word, the work moves quickly from an everyday visual object to the symbolic space of language; that is, to the domain of history, memory, social conditions, expressive conventions and emotional experience proper.
 
The work is certainly not all openness and indeterminacy, however. The history, traditions and experiences to which it makes oblique but insistent reference are concrete and specific. Indeed, part of the aspiration of the artist would seem to be to augment an awareness of Cork’s minor histories among the local community, albeit from a viewpoint not often considered and from one which will reveal the city differently. Or, more openly: to deliver a rebus-like object, at once slight, enigmatic and compelling, which would encourage curiosity about that to which it refers.
 
Maddie Leach’s adjustment of an apparently unremarkable public space, then, demonstrates the power of the addition of a frame. What happens to our familiar reality when it is designated differently in language? Evening Echo, as its title suggests, is firmly embedded in the specificity of local history; but just as the threads of that historical fabric themselves unwind into the macrocosmic narratives of world-historical processes, so the reverberations of this public artwork extend into artistic and philosophical territory which travels beyond the local and particular. A largely invisible community given visibility; a communal space animated by new meanings; our time punctuated differently.
 
 
Evening Echo is presented by the National Sculpture Factory, Cork City Council and Board Gais; the lamps were first lit on 27 December 2011, and City Council have agreed to maintain the lamps for the next 50 years. It is hoped that the project continues beyond that date.

This exhibition, curated by John Elderfield, was the first major retrospective of de Kooning’s work since the artist’s death in 1997. Its almost 200 artworks (paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures) were arranged into seven chronological sections, constituting a kind of cradle-to-grave narrative, from the artist’s juvenilia and early encounters with European Modernism during the 1910s and ‘20s, right through to his late, spare, precarious abstractions from the 1980s. While the exhibition was not exhaustive, the selection was superb, with the museum having had the resources to borrow almost all the key works they desired. All the major statements were represented here: the seated figures from the early 1940s, testament to de Kooning’s nuanced and powerful draughtsmanship (and his debt to Picasso); the black and white calligraphic abstractions of the late 1940s, with which he attracted the admiration of the likes of Clement Greenberg; the compositional complexity and corporeal energy of Attic and Excavation (1949 and 1950 respectively); the striking gestural force and chromatic intensity of the ‘Woman’ pictures shown at Sidney Janis in 1953 (although one of these was missing here); the brimming, voracious confidence of the large ‘full arm sweeps’ and ‘abstract urban landscapes’ from the mid-late 1950s; two paired, lambent pastel-coloured Arcadian abstractions (Rosy-Fingered Dawn at Louse Point, 1963, and Door to the River, 1960); the spilling, leaking, unsublimated eroticism of his Women from the mid-60s; and, a final triumph, a series of abstract canvases of uniform dimensions (196 x 223cm), titled poetically and possessing the saturated yet composed pleasure of a painter so in control of his medium as to have been able not only to seize upon the surprise gifts of a fast process, but also to have secured for them a potent structural force that strengthens their affective impact.

 
These much-celebrated high-points were accompanied by a selection of less familiar drawings, many of which, especially those from the early 1950s, were equally (if differently) impressive visually. Others, and this went for some of the paintings from the mid-1940s also, seemed selected for the revelations they offered regarding process rather than their specifically visual rewards. Some prints were also included, as well as two mono-prints on newspaper, which were made from the sheets the artist used to keep the surface of his paintings from drying out. De Kooning did not take up sculpture until the 1960s, but Elderfield’s selection shows an unprecious, ribald and subversive plastic imagination, anticipating the low pleasures and slapstick grotesquery of Paul McCarthy, for example.
 
Indeed, de Kooning remains a fecund artist for today, more so in some ways than his now more celebrated contemporaries Pollock or Rothko. His work is not only able to survive a variety of critiques leveled against it (or against ‘Action Painting’ less specifically), but also to respond to and even align with some of these newer priorities and tendencies. In 1953 Robert Rauschenberg, a great admirer of de Kooning, erased one of his drawings and later exhibited it as his own work; but de Kooning’s own drawings were already dense palimpsests of erasures. Pop Art critiqued the emphasis upon privacy and authenticity in Abstract Expressionism, as against the surfaces and spectacles of the commodity and the mass media; but de Kooning himself famously used a smiling mouth cut from a cigarette advert as the fulcrum for his Woman I, and already by 1955 (Gotham News, 1955; Easter Monday, 1955-6) he was including transfers from newspaper pages on the surfaces of his paintings.
 
This is not to reduce the profound differences between the neo-avant-garde and de Kooning’s modes. Perhaps most importantly, de Kooning interrogated painting from within, not from without: there is never a sense that he questions the value of painting as such, or large-scale gestural painting in particular. The extraordinary amount of time de Kooning spent in the studio is testament to his profound existential connection with the activity of painting: while not wishing to hyperbolize, it does seem accurate to say that he devoted his life to it. But for many such an artistic idiom has long been saturated and claims for de Kooning’s continuing relevance will not convince everyone. He was unorthodox even as a Modernist painter, but he wasn’t an avant-gardist at all (in the sense of employing art, often against itself, to overthrow existing economic, political and institutional structures).
 
The status of de Kooning’s achievement with regards to the politics of gender and sexuality is much harder to determine. Neither the exhibition wall texts nor the substantial, beautifully illustrated catalogue will help very much in developing a concern with these issues. The curatorial frame of the exhibition was conservative in this respect. The French feminist philosopher and theorist Julia Kristeva once described de Kooning’s Women as a ‘massacre’ on the canvas. While this is not perhaps the most subtle reading of the paintings themselves, the terms that Kristeva had already developed to theorize poetic language do prove useful here.
 
Kristeva’s concept of the ‘semiotic’ designates aspects of a poetic text (inclusive of painting) that evidence a kind of revenge of the drives upon the conventional structures of language necessary to produce properly socialized subjects. For Kristeva, a poetic space is one where, once these symbolic structures have been mastered and internalized, the unruly, gestural, rhythmic, frequently destructive energy of the drives re-asserts itself. This makes contact with infantile experience in the sense that it brings into visibility aspects of the subject which have had to be silenced or repressed in the process of socialization, but Kristeva was adamant that for poetic language to have any real significance required a sustained going through and not an abandonment of the symbolic order. De Kooning was of course the master draughtsman, by far the best trained and most gifted of his Abstract Expressionist contemporaries in this respect. He had fully mastered the conventions of academic picture making, but subsequently strove to disable, dismantle or bypass the easy satisfactions of the exercise of such facility in favour of something more surprising and unruly. Many of de Kooning’s mature paintings present an overpowering mixture of bodily expenditure and unedited pleasure, sustained by a dense, rich, wet material ground. They are both striking and sustaining in their formal potency and sophistication, but the oddly unsublimated, truant and open quality of their energy (which might usefully be thought of in terms of the drives) means that their structural coherence is never fully divorcable from a ‘semiotic’ excess.
 
Elderfield is rightly skeptical of commentators who read de Kooning’s art as symptoms of a personal misogyny; but the case for the artist’s condition of freedom or his ‘poetic’ experimentations might be interestingly complicated by a more sustained exploration of the formation of subjectivity itself.
 
 
De Kooning: A Retrospective was on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 18 September 2011 – 9 January 2012.